ABSTRACT

Around 1820 a new type of building appeared in European cities, for example in

Paris and London, when, at the fringes of the residential areas, new suburbs

appeared: no longer the aristocratic suburbs of second homes – country houses

where one might go pour souper in the evening – but suburbs of the bourgeois,

which claimed to be able simultaneously to enjoy the advantages of both the

city and the countryside in dwellings of relatively modest size. In spite of this

change of the layout of the Enlightenment city, the definition of the city in

French dictionaries remained that of the Encyclopédie, and beyond that of the

great authoritative treatises of classical architecture from the second half of the

seventeenth century onwards. The city, which was created in a supposedly

spontaneous way according to requirements of the moment, was thus gener-

ally defined by its limits (whether of military or of tax-related origin) and by the

accumulation of houses and by their regular distribution along the streets. From

selected elements (the wall, the street) and relations (assemblage, disposition,

etc.) the definition of the city, not only in general but also in more specialized

dictionaries, seems to remain immutable. In the Dictionnaire de l’Académie

Française published in 1694, the city is ‘an assembly of several houses laid out

by streets and closed by a common limit which is usually of walls and ditches’,

just as in the Dictionnaire National of Bescherelle the elder, published in 1846,

it is ‘an assembly of a great number of houses laid out by streets, and often

surrounded by a common limit, which is usually of walls and ditches’. Of

course one might suppose that there might be a time-lag between changes in

the city and the lexicographers catching up with them, but these definitions do

not include the softened city edge that was being made by some innovative

picturesque estates, which indeed explicitly called into question such a

definition.